The language is really poor and have not evolved with the needs of user. To fix that, we can use javascript to manipulate the DOM but it is take a lot of lines of code to do small things. We have AJAX to have better performance by not refresh the whole page.

And we have Flash, Silverlight, Moonlight, XUL,… which are basically plug-in over your browser to add a lot of cool things to your browser.

And a lot of people talked about who will win … but we have forget the HTML standard which have not evolved during a long time. The working draft of HTML 5 seems very promising.

This is a working draft, so all can evolved but we can see what they want to do…

To sum up they add a lot of missing things witch is done with AJAX, javascript, …

Document structure: section, header, footer, article, aside will be useful to cut your document in area

Multimedia flag: video, audio will replace the object flag and will be more easier to use and canvas will allow dynamic drawing (ever in Firefox 2)

forms: the specification of WHATWG show what will be done here. But nothing is currently in the working draft. But we can hope new input attributs: calendar, timepicker, email, … and repeater to avoid to have a list same flags…

new controls: Datagrid to make tabular or hierarchical set of rows of elements. progress and meter will be cool to show to user that he have to wait. it is better than a GIF or an Ajax progress bar. And we have some other things as command and menu

area post: it will replace Ajax for a lot of things… here we have datatemplate, rule and nest flag to manage the template dynamically. I have not understand all here but sounds promising….

storing data in database: but in local and this will be persistant during the session.

catch drag&drop without javascirpt😉

This draft will evolved maybe in good maybe in bad way but hope standard will bring a lot of missing things. I do not think we will have all features of flash/silverlight in HTML5 but we will get a lot of cool new things. We will still be far from rich browser plugin but we get lot of cool new things in standard…

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ
“The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born. “